Al Golin in 2011. His cold call to Ray Kroc to win a modest public relations contract began a relationship that helped McDonald’s sell billions of burgers.Credit
Golin

In 1955, a Chicago milkshake-machine salesman was so impressed by a California client’s assembly-line-style restaurant that he bought the franchising rights and opened his own hamburger stand modeled after it in suburban Des Plaines, Ill.

Boasting 15-cent burgers, ample free parking and “speedee service,” he hoped to lure hungry customers traveling between Chicago and nearby lake resorts, and also to recruit more franchisees.

One day, Al Golin, a fledgling press agent who was 28 at the time, stumbled on an advertisement for the establishment, with its signature golden arches, and telephoned, unsolicited, to make a public relations pitch to the struggling, newly minted restaurateur who had opened the business. The man’s name was Ray Kroc. The restaurant was called McDonald’s.

“Ray had a small office in downtown Chicago, and he told me come over,” Mr. Golin recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 2008. “I said, ‘Now?’ and he said, ‘Yes, now is fine.’”

In another interview, Mr. Golin said, “At that point, when they were so small and I knew they were planning on opening quite a bit all over the country, I thought that public relations would be an economical way to get this story told.”

With business slow in the beginning, Mr. Kroc was not taking a salary himself. But after a persuasive pitch from Mr. Golin — who, by at least one account, was accompanied by an associate, Ben Burns — Mr. Kroc hired the six-man firm for which Mr. Golin worked, paying it $500 a month (about $4,500 in today’s dollars), and told him to report for work the following Monday.

“Ray regaled Burns and Golin with his passion for hamburgers,” Lisa Napoli wrote in a 2016 book, “Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away.” (The title refers to Joan Kroc, Ray’s third wife.) “They, in turn, regaled him with the power and potential of publicity.”

Mr. Golin, who died at 87 on April 8 in Scottsdale, Ariz., retained the McDonald’s account for 60 years in what is probably among the most enduring partnerships between a corporate client and its public relations firm.

“We never would have made it without your help,” Mr. Kroc wrote Mr. Golin in 1977, billions of burgers later. “We were immature amateurs with virtually no friends.”

Mr. Golin and his firm, Mr. Kroc said in a 1977 memoir, “deserve a lot of the credit for making McDonald’s a household word.”

Shelby Yastrow, who negotiated Mr. Kroc’s buyout of the McDonald brothers of California and later became the company’s counsel, was quoted in Crain’s Chicago Business as saying that Mr. Golin’s “importance to the success of McDonald’s could never be overstated.”

Before corporate social responsibility and cause-related marketing became fashionable, Mr. Golin was instrumental in creating what he called a trust bank. He encouraged the McDonald’s Corporation to sponsor Ronald McDonald Houses for children with life-threatening illnesses, an All-American High School Marching Band, an All-American High School Basketball Game and the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon — all to build good will that could be drawn upon when the company needed public support.

Mr. Golin was credited with coming up with the name Hamburger University for McDonald’s training program for managers. He also claimed to have coined the term “trust strategists” for public relations professionals. He preferred to anticipate crises rather than to react to them. “Fix it before it breaks” was a favorite aphorism.

To whatever degree he deserved credit for McDonald’s phenomenal growth, Mr. Golin’s own company also flourished.

From the shrewd cold call to Mr. Kroc in 1957 and the $500-a-month McDonald’s account, what is now known as Golin grew into one of the world’s Top 10 public relations firms, employing 1,200 people and, according to The Holmes Report in 2016, bringing in more than $200 million a year in revenue.

Its clients over the years have included DaimlerChrysler, Gerber, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Nintendo, Texas Instruments, Walmart, Wrigley and Unilever.

Mr. Golin was born on June 19, 1929, in Chicago to Charles Golin and the former Jeanette Gumbiner. His mother’s family owned movie theaters, and his father managed one in the city’s Uptown neighborhood, which made Al a popular boy.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in business, with a minor in journalism, from what is now Roosevelt University in Chicago. Hoping to enter the movie business, he became a press agent for MGM. After five years, he joined Max Cooper & Associates, where he was working when he called Mr. Kroc. He became a partner in the agency and then its sole owner, changing the name to Golin.

He is survived by his wife, the former June Kerns; their three children, Barry and Karen Golin and Ellen Resnick; six grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

“Someone once asked me, ‘Was the call to Ray Kroc — the cold phone call you made all these years ago — the most important call you ever made in your life?’” Mr. Golin said last year at his company’s 60th-anniversary celebration. “And I said: ‘No, it was really the second most important call. The first one was asking my wife, June, out for our first date.’”

A version of this article appears in print on April 16, 2017, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Al Golin, Visionary Marketer Of McDonald’s, Is Dead at 87. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe